


Code Red

by CiderApples



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, Domestic, F/M, Romance, Weird Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-29
Updated: 2017-11-29
Packaged: 2019-02-08 12:58:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12864996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CiderApples/pseuds/CiderApples
Summary: Lynyrd Skynyrd on a dark road really wrings the shittiness out of him. Lynyrd Skynyrd, and being ten minutes and a football field away from sharing a Camel with Joyce Byers and bitching about their kids.





	Code Red

Movie night is Wednesday.

Wednesday gets the honor because Wednesday sucks: because he has to do the weekend paperwork that he’d put off Monday and Tuesday but can’t leave for Thursday because the guy from state comes to pick it up. And Wednesday is Flo’s day off, and the Markey girl that fills in for her is just a little in love with him and just _barely_ not a child. All day long it’s ‘oh, Sheriff Hopper,’ and mooney stares through the window of his office door and more hot coffee refills than he can reasonably consume.

He’d can her if Big Pam Markey, PTA president, didn’t scare the shit out of him.

Big Pam Markey scares the shit out of him.

Shoulder pads the size of hubcaps: he _should_ be scared.

By the time Hop drops little Pam off at home (really not the purview of the police department, as he’s told Big Pam _never_ , not once, and he’s never going to) and hits the IGA for beer and defrostables, it’s almost seven. He’s got the energy to operate anything that requires three fingers or fewer: a microwave. A bottle opener. A VCR.

He takes the truck quicker than he should down the driveway. It pitches like a ship through the washouts and ruts, waggling his spine like a rope, gravel patches vibrating up through his thighs and out through his ears. It shakes the stress out of him, leaving him with pure, distilled mental fatigue and the bodily constitution of wilted celery. El doesn't seem to notice: as soon as his keys turn in the door, she comes at him with such-and-such permission slips he has to sign and look-at-this-test-I-got-a-hundred-on and somebody’s birthday party is tomorrow and we need a present _right now_ and it has to be _cool_.

His hand feels like a gigantic paw on her little head, sinking into the kelp forest of her curls, slightly green from her recent attempt to go blonde. He keeps her at elbow’s length so he can get around her into the kitchen — beer to the fridge, first things first — then pulls out a chair at the table to attack the permission slips. There’s a pen already there.

“This one is to go to the mayor’s office,” she says, kneeing up onto the opposing chair and splaying across the table to fingerpoint to the empty line.

“Mayor’s office?” he mutters. “That’s a field trip, now?”

El rolls her eyes.

“You know I can take you to the mayor’s office whenever you want.” He signs: a wiggly line with nothing particularly Hoppery about it. He’s gotta change that before she starts forging things just because she thinks she can get away with it.

“Um, no thanks,” she says. She slips the sheet away and slaps another one down. “This is because Amy Waltrine has strep.”

He adjusts the paper to get a better position to try a new signature.

“But she doesn’t really have strep,” El says, as he thinks about what to change. “She has the clap. So, don’t worry about it.”

Hop’s pen hovers in the air. So many things wrong with the words that just flew nonchalantly out of his daughter’s mouth. “She has the _what?”_ he says, squinting incredulously. El senses, just now, that this is one of those things she didn’t quite put in the right box.

“The…clap?”

“Who told you that?”

“Amy Waltrine?”

“She just — you kids talk about that stuff?”

El shrugs.

Hop shakes his head. He doesn’t understand the world anymore. Since when was gonorrhea some perverted badge of honor? Back in the day you felt some healthy shame and kept your mouth shut about it and never went into the backseat with Mary Kelly again.

 _Kids_.

“Well, look,” he said, finally touching pen to page again. “You remember that conversation we had? About boy-girl stuff?” He glances up to make sure El’s blushing bright red. Yeah, she remembers.

“Daaaaad,” she says. “I’m not… _doing_ it.”

“That’s right you’re not,” he says. He scrawls his name, tosses the pen down and lets her take the sheet. Dammit— he forgot to try the new signature. “And if you are…”

“They’re in the kitchen drawer.”

He stares her down across the table. If she can’t say the word to him, no way is it going to roll off her tongue with little Jimmy Johnson. “What are in the kitchen drawer?”

“Ugh,” she protests, but she levels the stare back at him. _“Condoms.”_

Hop sighs again, deep and huffy, like he can wipe his brain clean. “Go put that stuff away. You’ve got a movie to pick.”

Clutching her forms, El slides back into her seat and looks at him apprehensively.

“What?” he asks. He leans back in his chair until the vertebrae crack. El makes a face: _gross_. Hop grins behind his scruffy beard. “What?” he repeats.

She looks hesitantly toward the door, just as he realizes she’s not in her traditional movie night attire. No boy band t-shirt. No little cartoon pajama pants. No floofy slippers.

“You got plans?” he asks.

She looks at him with loosely feigned remorse, but she’s hovering on the edge of the kitchen chair with anticipation, glancing again toward the door.

“On movie night?” Hop presses. Does he sound pathetic? He wants to sound funny, but she’s never missed a movie night. It’s their night: he suffers through some unbearable flick and they plow through bags of microwave popcorn and he gets to sit next to her on the couch and pretend she’s still his little girl. Movie night.

But suddenly, El looks genuinely apologetic, and Hop snaps himself out of it.

“Alright, then,” he says. He puts his hands on the table top, letting the smooth formica slip under his fingers. “Whose door’ll I have to break down if you’re late?”

El’s face breaks into sunrise. She leaps from the chair, quick as a bird, and pecks him on the cheek. The things he trades. “Movies. Max and everybody.”

'Everybody' includes Mike, he's sure, but he doesn’t have to press it. “Remember,” he prompts, and she knows the drill.

“Home by nine, or call. Say please and thank you. Don’t break the law, unless I can get away with it.”

“That last part was a joke,” he says, but he likes it, and he likes that she’s kept it. There’re too many rules in the world to begin with; let her bend a few.

El disappears down the hall in a flurry of dry-leaf footsteps, and Hopper is left alone in a suddenly-silent kitchen. He’s got three videos on top of the TV, all tailored toward the mercurial preferences of a teenager, and an extra TV dinner to kill.

Salisbury steak and Sixteen Candles.

What a night.

 

* * *

  
  
Twenty-five minutes of Long Duk Dong and mushy peas are about all Hop can take.

He shoves the unfinished plastic tray to the other side of the couch and pauses the video. For a long moment, he stares into the tape squiggles, trying to figure out why he feels like a potato about to explode in the microwave.

One missed movie night is…nothing. There’s plenty worse going on around town: the little assholes that huff paint behind the Ace, or the punks he has to run off the record store every other night with their weird hair and racoony eye junk. It’s not like she’s shoplifting girl crap from the drugstore, or getting busted out on Boner Boulevard in some kid’s beater.

But it’s not _just_ a missed movie night.

It’s all these little things that’ve started creeping up on him, one at a time until he can’t shut the door on them anymore.

She doesn’t sit next to him on the couch anymore, for one. Sometime over the summer she’d claimed the opposite armrest, and the first few times she’d had a reason (a hot mug of something to balance, a school notebook with homework to finish) but now she never does.

And she doesn’t do bedtime anymore, either. Used to be he’d come in and sit down and she’d roll toward him, pretending to be sucked into the giant vortex his two-hundred-fifty pounds made in her mattress. They’d shoot the shit about this shitty kid and that cool kid and some field trip coming up and what did she want for Christmas and should they get a puppy, and then he’d kiss the top of her head and make a mess of her hair and close the door behind him when he left. But lately he goes to check on her and the door’s already shut, some weird music going on, and she yells, ‘night, dad’ and he stands there like an idiot in the dark, wondering what the hell changed.

He’s too old for this shit.

Heaving himself up off the couch, he marches to the kitchen, grabs the phone off the wall and punches a number.

 _“Code red, Joyce,”_ he says, when she picks up. _“Code red.”_

 

* * *

  
  
The first thing that Joyce says is—

—no, the first thing Joyce says, _after_ ‘light me, Hop,’ is:

“Is this about Amy Waltrine?”

Hop is knee-deep in a drag on his Camel and he almost chokes it out. “The clap kid?” he says, finally, on the exhale.

Joyce makes a face. "Hop."

“No, it’s not about the clap kid.” He shakes his head in his own cloud. He manages to contain himself for a few seconds before the indignation bristles through. “I don’t get it; I really don’t. How’re they even doing that at this age? We were, like, sixteen!”

“Seventeen,” Joyce says.

“Sixteen; seventeen…this kid’s, what, thirteen?”

“Fifteen, almost sixteen” Joyce says. “Two years older than Will.”

Hopper sulks and passes the cigarette. “Still. She got it in her _throat_.”

 _“Hop.”_ Joyce slaps him on the shoulder. She sips when she smokes, making choo-choo puffs that sail past Hopper’s face in the dark. When she’s done, she dances the cigarette back in front of his face, and he tries to take it but she doesn’t let him. He can’t miss the look she gives him.

“There but for the grace of prophylactics went I,” she reminds him. “And you.”

Hop sighs and rolls his whole head. She lets go of the cigarette.

“Just don’t say anything to Shelly, okay,” she says. “She’s mortified.”

Hopper nods in agreement — though why he would ever mention that to Shelly in the first place is beyond him — and takes a slower, gentler puff. He’s starting to calm down. Actually, he’d calmed down a bunch on the way over: Lynyrd Skynyrd on a dark road really wrings the shittiness out of him. Lynyrd Skynyrd, and being ten minutes and a football field away from sharing a Camel with Joyce Byers and bitching about their kids.

_Solidarity, man._

“So who was the other kid?” Hop asks. He tries to do it surreptitiously but Joyce knows him way too well.

“What are you going to do, lock him up?”

“Maybe.”

“El’s smart,” Joyce says, smiling out over the field. The whole thing is dark except for the red playclock, which somehow never shuts off. The white lines are fresh, glowing in the moon.

“Yeah, she is.” Hop’s attention, too, settles on the red clock. Eight thirty-two. He’s too fucking tired for eight thirty-two.

They both go quiet.

“Thanks for coming out,” he says after a while. Even after just the one smoke, his voice is back in the gravelly gutter where it used to sit when he was sucking down two packs a day. “I’m still quitting,” he says. “Sometimes you just need a goddamn cigarette.”

Joyce agrees in silence.

“What happens to these kids, huh?” he asks. The words are as soft and faint as his breath. He turns his head to her, beard rustling over the fleecy ruff of his coat. Her face is neutral, receptive. It encourages him. “It’s all, movie night and chasin’ ‘em down the hall and ‘daddy, do my hair’ and then, boom, she’s going out at night and some kid’s got the clap.”

Joyce gives his arm a little wiggle. “It’s not that bad,” she says.

“Hey, I’m not saying a kid can’t have freedom,” he says. “Just-”

“Just what?”

He holds his breath like it helps him think. “Well, you kept yours right,” he says. “How’d you do it?”

Her mouth quirks. “What do you mean by that?”

“You know,” he says. “You’ve got two…” He doesn’t want to say it, but there’s no other way to put it. At least, not that he’s clever enough to come up with. “Two fine, upstanding momma’s boys.” He puts his hands out between them to forestall her open-mouthed offense. “Look, I’m not saying it’s a bad thing; that’s what I want. I mean, those kids miss you when you go to take a piss.”

“That’s disgusting.”

He shrugs, shoulders and eyebrows hitching up together. “You like it.”

“I like my boys,” she says.

“And they like you.”

Joyce presses her lips together and leans deeper into Hop’s shoulder, close to feeling his arm through the eight layers of coat and flannel.

“El loves you, Hop," she says. "She’s not going anywhere. But she’s gotta have something else going on.” Hop snorts a billow of air over his shiny, iced beard. It reminds Joyce of a billy goat. Put some horns on him: he’s got the whole stubborn rest of it covered. “A girl can’t live on Schlitz and Bob Seeger alone.”

He head butts her. Just gently…but the goat thing stands. “Schlitz and Seeger worked pretty well for you when we were kids,” he mutters gruffly. He stubs the cigarette out on the silver slat and drops it through the gap, condemned to the no-man’s-land under the bleachers.

“Well, I was a little weird,” she says.

“A _little_ ,” he corroborates.

She leans in to shoulder-check him but he sees her coming. His big arm catches her at her zenith and mashes her deep into all that coat fluff. Some of it, she can tell from the warmth, is Hopper fluff. Both are very cozy to be smashed against, but Hop still, after twenty years, doesn’t know his own strength. Joyce’s peeping sound is how she communicates that he’s got her ribcage in a vice.

“Sorry,” he says, but he only loosens up a little.

They breathe together (Joyce, still shallowly).

Look at the stars.

They stay motionless enough that their warmth hangs around them, and the punishment of fresh cold discourages even the slightest shift. Joyce lights another cigarette and smokes it like a statue, hand stuck up by her mouth. When it’s mostly done she tosses it down with all the other illegal, irresponsible, little-forest-animal-poisoning litter.  
She feels Hopper’s chin double up against the top of her head when he looks down at her, and she looks up expecting a sarcastic scolding but gets a totally different Hopper.

A little more open around the eyes.

A little more pink in the cheeks.

A little less symmetrical in the smile.

She knew that look twenty years ago, and it hasn’t changed _at all_.

He’s gonna ask.

“Joyce,” he says, staring not at her, but at the stars.

“Yeah, Hop.”

They’ve been circling this, not like a drain but like a hunt. Every night drive, every smoke-out behind the high school, every midnight fried egg at the diner, they’ve come closer and closer to some center, like the North Pole, and Hop’s got this flag to plant. At this point, he’s so used to carrying it he doesn’t realize how heavy it’s become.  
His shoulders bend under it: all the time, but especially here, and now.

Joyce’s body is pulled suddenly, gracelessly, by an unscripted jerk of his arm.

“Sorry to get you out here on a school night,” he says. “I know you’ve got…stuff.”

He gets up, bleacher creaking, and offers her a hand.

The flag stays where it is, tied to his back.

His loss makes her cold, but his hand is still warm to the touch.

“We’ve all got stuff,” she says. “You know I’m here for ya.” She says 'ya' instead of ‘you’ so he won’t get scared. For a terrifying bearlike human being, it’s surprisingly easy to get his tail between his legs: sometimes just the barest hint of sincerity’ll do it. Then, of course, there are times he surprises her.

Though he doesn’t often do it this way.

“I love you, Joyce.”

Lightning.

It’s like she’s opened her coat, and shirt, and everything — all the way down — and let winter pour in. Just, ice, through every inch of her body.

Hop just sighs, eyebrows furrowing so deep they hide his eyes. “No, no,” he says, and Joyce realizes her face must be stuck in some terrible expression: it gets away from her sometimes. Hopper grips her shoulders, facing him, corralling her. “Here, it’s—” he sighs again “—it’s this whole thing with El. And with-”

His head dips. Hands loosen. Joyce puts hers up around his wrists and squeezes.

“With Sara, we always said we weren’t going to let it happen, you know?” He keeps looking at the ground. “We weren’t going to let her get too cool.” He laughs, but not really. “The world wasn’t gonna get her. She was going to stay our little girl.”

Joyce squeezes harder. Hop squeezes back.

“Growing up shouldn’t mean you can’t hug your dad or smile or actually like anything. But these kids hit high school and ‘love’ means ‘fuck’ and I think that — I think it’s fucked up. I think it fucks kids up. And I’m not letting some bozo kids convince my daughter that you have to turn into one of those record store punks on your thirteenth birthday.”

He stops talking. Out of breath, maybe.

Joyce is still frozen in place. She dares lift her eyes, and he’s looking right back at her. His gaze sticks like glue.

A few moments into his silence, she says: “What does that have to do with-”

“Everything,” he says. “I’m getting the word out. I’m gonna use it.”

She blinks.

“So, I love you,” he says. “And you love me. And we should fucking say it.”

She blinks again.

“Look: it means something that I call you,” he says. “And it means something that you come. It doesn’t have to mean more than that, but let’s call it what it is.”

She’s voiceless.

He’s impatient.

“You don’t have to get all weird about it. The whole idea is that you _don’t_ get all weird about it.”

She nods. “I get it,” she says, a little raspy, and forces a smile.

“Come on,” he says, half joking. “Don’t tell me the cool kids got to you, too.”

Joyce doesn’t know how to explain to him what’s happening to her at this second, as he looks at her and she’s appearing to stay exactly the same. A fuse has been replaced somewhere, something she’d burned out so long ago and gone without for so long she’d forgotten it was ever there. Circuit completed. And what she feels, is a bewildering combination of fear and fearlessness.

The fear feels familiar. She’s no stranger to fear: everything she’s ever gotten for herself has made her afraid in return. Her beautiful, fragile kids; Her beautiful, shameless husband; Her weird, shattered reputation. It’s all mixed up into a wet, cold, ash that’s frozen like cement around her life. But she hasn’t felt fearless in a long, long time, and she doesn’t know why now, except that it’s in some way because Hopper loves her and Hopper is good.

Good in a way that’s beyond morality. Beyond reason. The kind of good he is, is elemental. She can smell it in the back of her head.

She’s been waiting for years, maybe since high school, for this declaration of love to come floating up out of him, like a body from a swamp. She realizes now that she’s been dreading it. More fear. Fear that love would mean fuck, maybe: like he’d said. And that the last little pure thing she’d been able to keep from the cement would be buried and gone.

But this is not a burial.

This is a force of nature, six-foot-four and heavy, unstoppable, coming out of the woods to stand in front of her and kneel.

It feels like the opposite of fear; it feels powerful, and she feels taller, and stronger, and when she looks up at him she takes his gaze straight. The way he looks back at her says she can get whatever she asks for.

He licks his lips.

He’s not afraid of her, either.


End file.
